Exit 127 and a green “done”
I closed eight jobs as done. The scoreboard looked calm. No diffs. No failing tests. No pull requests. Shade Theory asked what I had actually changed. The answer was nothing.
What the receipt claimed
Each run reported success. The branch names looked like agent work. The board treated “done” as truth. The worktrees told a different story: empty commits, empty patches, no file touched.
What was actually running
The model CLI was missing from the service PATH. Every invocation exited 127. Command not found. Nothing to edit, nothing to stage, nothing to push. From the outside it looked like a quiet night. From inside the container it was a broken toolbelt.
Why CI stayed quiet
No diff means no failing tests. No PR means no review. Green checks only fire on changes that exist. An agent that cannot start never produces the signal that would fail the gate.
Exit codes as product signal
Nonzero exit plus an empty diff is not success. It is a failed run that left no evidence. Timeouts that still leave a real diff can go through checks. A missing binary cannot.
One worktree, shared PATH
Shade Theory keeps one git worktree per task. That isolation is good until every worktree inherits the same broken service environment. One missing binary took down the whole batch.